Mainstream approaches to conflict are underpinned by many assumptions. The assumption that the use of force or the threat is the most appropriate response to conflicts. That men are the “protectors” and women are the “victims”. Assumptions about who has legitimacy and right to negotiate the solutions. Assumptions about who can and should profit from the destruction. Assumptions that exclude vast segments of the society. Likewise, neoliberalism is underpinned by a plethora of assumptions which exclude and dehumanize.
What we have learnt over the course of the long history of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) by listening to women is that challenging the structures upon which these assumptions lie is what transformative peacebuilding is about. Neoliberal theory and policies fail in so-called peaceful contexts, and we argue that these failures are compounded in conflict and post-conflict contexts when cooperation and inclusion are essential. It is a system of greed where the warlords are the shareholders.
WILPF’s work in conflict and post-conflict contexts demonstrates how the sort of economic policies we choose to roll out in these settings cannot be separated from lived and highly gendered experiences of war, and from the new, and often more complex and overlapping needs that emerge as a result of that conflict. How we manage to integrate the need for social, political and economic transformation of a society coming out of war will make a difference between a sustainable and justice peace – a feminist peace – and a fragile peace that continuously puts people’s lives, and entire societies, in danger.
WILPF’s analysis from Bosnia unpacks the perils of peace built on neoliberal assumptions (see WILPF, 2017). The post-conflict reconstruction was underpinned by assumptions that the free market, deregulations and privatizations would lead to growth and prosperity and thus peace. The negotiator of these policies was the corrupt, militarized ethno-national political elite who had everything to gain and nothing to lose. Women and other civilian groups were excluded. Today, economic reform policies, 25 years after the war, continue to be conflict and gender blind. Instead of reducing inequalities, they add to the complexities and drivers of further tension, entrenching structural and gender inequalities and social conflict. That is why “sustainable peace” that prioritizes human rights, in particular economic, social, and cultural rights, is so critical. Not only as early warning for armed violence but to ensure transformation.
Decades of neoliberalism and austerity measures, paralleled with unprecedented accumulation of wealth where the richest 1% own double as much as 6.9 billion people (see Oxfam, 2020) have directly fueled conflicts, put people’s ability to live dignified lives into question, and constrained the space needed for that transformative peacebuilding to take place.
Structural inequalities that are at the core of today’s system have consequences for the stability and peace itself. They are gender, class and racially biased. But unequal and uneven access and distribution of resources has gone for long enough. People are reacting and acting. This we see around the world, from Chile to Lebanon. People demanding their right to live decent lives. But we also see these demands being met with oppression, increased militarization and crack-down on protestors. This demonstrates to us how the neoliberal system cannot be separated from patriarchy and militarism: “male dominance is tightly intersected with the class inequalities of capitalism and the racialist domination of some nations and ethnic groups by others. Together they perpetuate war,” summarizes WILPF’s Manifesto (see WILPF, 2015).
Neoliberal policies, fathered by the capitalist economic system, fuel inequality. Reduction in public spending, privatization and deregulation of the market are the new normal (see Ortiz and Cummins, 2019) while blind trust is put into corporations and other private actors to pick up the slack left by crumbling state structures. What we have learned from women in conflict is that underpinning the root causes of war is the corrupt and exploitative economic systems. War is fueled in large part by profitability. So are, it seems, the recovery and peacebuilding plans. The political economy of war and peace. Both of which need to be critically analyzed and challenged, and feminist political economy presents itself as a powerful tool which can help us re-imagine the world we live in (see WILPF 2018).
In the wake of feminist critique coming from both peace activists and academics on the gender-blindness of the neoliberal policies, neoliberalism has proven cooptive. Particularly telling example is the neoliberal narrative of women’s economic empowerment and leadership. In a world where 1% has double as much as 6.9 billion people, it does not matter whether women are equally represented among these 1% or not! Adding a few women to the privileged top tier of the society is not what feminist mean when they talk about empowerment and leadership. It is not about moulding women to fit into the current system. It is about transforming that system so that we can build societies of justice, equality and demilitarized security. We must all dare to think of a world “beyond capitalism”.
WILPF members around the world today call for dismantling the current system of injustice and structural inequality and building a new one. This will require us to find ways to reject and resist existing economic relations and practices; to invent new forms of ownership and control over natural resources; to imagine new forms of redistribution of wealth, and new ways of thinking about growth. It will require us to rethink the relationship between growth and environmental sustainability – with special regard to the rights of nature, peoples’ land rights and food sovereignty. This imagines creative work of solidarity across hemispheres, national borders, cultural groups, localities, classes and genders that is unprecedented. But without it, peace will never be within our reach.
For some examples of writers: Klein, Naomi, 2007.The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Klein, Naomi, 2014. This Changes Everything : Capitalism vs. the Climate; Raworth, Kate, 2018. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist; Fraser, Nancy, 2009. Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of the History; Federici, Silvia, 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle; and True, Jacqui, 2014. The Political Economy of Violence Against Women.
